Oh, I may be on the side of the angels, but don't think for one second that I am one of them. – Sherlock

Archive for the ‘Politics’ Category

In talking with Laconic Pup about Minecraft (which he is even more of a newbie than myself in) we were discussing the benefits of harvesting sheep (wool), pigs (pork chops), ducks (eggs), and cows (steaks). It was myself, Inscrutable Half-Breed, Laconic Pup, and ID10T Killer…

“We actually didn’t talk a whole lot about social schisms in my conversations with His Holiness,” Mr. Obama said at a press conference in Rome. “In fact, that really was not a topic of conversation.”

Mr. Obama deflected a reporter’s question about the extent of his discussion with the pope on the contraceptive mandate by saying that Francis “actually did not touch in detail” on the subject. The administration has been locked in a lengthy legal and political battle with the U.S. Catholic Church hierarchy over Obamacare and issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage.

The Vatican, however, issued a statement after the meeting saying the president’s discussions with Francis and two other top Vatican officials focused “on questions of particular relevance for the [Catholic] Church in [the United States], such as the exercise of the rights to religious freedom, life and conscientious objection” — issues that have fueled divisions between Mr. Obama and the church.

So… either the Pope is lying or the Dope is lying.

I say “The Pope smokes Dope”.

The president clearly wanted to benefit from the global popularity of the pope.

Well, duh. If the Pope had no chance of boosting his ratings, Obama would never have given him the time of day.
****Bullshit. I call bullshit.

Grossman’s pain-level was a 10 on a scale of 1-to-10, Allard said, and yet he fervently answered questions on everything from transgender rights and mandatory sex education to issues facing youth and aging members of the LGBTQ community.

If you can tolerate it, your pain isn’t a ten. Don’t go telling me you are a big tough guy. I had a compound fracture broken slowly… A ten is while it is being broken and you are screaming or in the throes of a cluster migraine. You cannot think. Your brain short-circuits at ten.

Kicked in the nuts hard is a nine. Breathing is hard. I hear gut wounds or appendicitis or things of that nature are 8-10, easy.

After a bone is broken, ok, it hurts bad… Now you are eight or nine. I dealt with that for hours. A bad regular migraine is this level. You can think, even if you do want to puke.

But you don’t hold a debate during a ten. Sorry. Now you’re just a lying sack of crap.

President Obama is threatening to veto a law that would allow Congress to sue him in federal courts for arbitrarily changing or refusing to enforce federal laws because it “violates the separation of powers” by encroaching on his presidential authority.

[Too bad he’s so loose with the limits to his auth-or-i-TAY… – LK]

“[T]he power the bill purports to assign to Congress to sue the President over whether he has properly discharged his constitutional obligation to take care that the laws be faithfully executed exceeds constitutional limitations,” the White House Office of Management and Budget said Wednesday in a statement of administration policy. “Congress may not assign such power to itself, nor may it assign to the courts the task of resolving such generalized political disputes.”

However… he hasn’t the authority to disregard his duties. All this stuff was already laid out in that 400 year old Constitution Jackson-Lee suddenly professes to believe in. It is a nation of rules and laws that was set up to take power out of individual men’s and group’s hands. They can change it via a 2/3 vote Amendment though. Let’s do that.

Congress AND the idiot in the White House have both granted themselves far too much power not expressly given them.

You might walk away from this post thinking I believe what reporters tell me, and you are right to a point. You might think I think much of polls, which I don’t at all. But polls do sometimes have value.

So yeah, I can link news articles. But for shits and giggles I searched out the results of all the years they did this. Here you go, the US world press freedom rankings from 2002 on. I wish the ranking went as far back as Nixon, but I will take this.

It is hardly the most transparent administration ever. How do I know it originates there? A fish rots from the head down.

It is very interesting. We got the post 9/11 bump I would have expected and then as the world relaxed I wasn’t surprised at the decline. We got a bounce that would correlate well with the coming of the Messiah changing of the guard and the (ig)Nobel Peace Prize but then tanked as rapidly as a proverbial three day old fish. There is a synopsis that goes along with each year but I have not read any of them prior to 2012.

But fairly consistently we suck and blow surprisingly bad given how proud we are of freedom of the press.

****

Have a cringe.

Have a Vermeer. Good art always relaxes me, like a kitten, just not quite as much.

By this logic we should all just move to communism, because anything you are able to do that is more than the least of us is owed to everyone else. Any advantage or largesse you have is artificially biased in your favor and as such you do not deserve it.

We currently have a highly discriminatory system where if you’re sick, if you’ve been sick or [if] you’re going to get sick, you cannot get health insurance.

The only way to end that discriminatory system is to bring everyone into the system and pay one fair price. That means that the genetic winners, the lottery winners who’ve been paying an artificially low price because of this discrimination now will have to pay more in return. – source here

Your extra hard work that you put into your business? That was from extra energy that was granted to you by your genetics. You are a good musician or engineer or soldier? That was your genetic jackpot, so give. Oh, so you sweated for years in school and worked hour after hour of unpaid OT because you are exempt from OT? Well, thank you for doing what your genetic potential allowed you the pleasure of doing, so hand me your wallet.

The magnitude of the antithesis of injustice here is astounding, and the rationale masquerades as compassion even as it oppresses. It does what it must, because it can.

I don’t know what I can say that trumps that in terms of stupidity so I will stop there.

****
No, I won’t stop here.

I want to come up with a Mike Rowe worthy expression. He manages to say things that are powerful but immediately sensible and respectful.

That is a gift.

A letter to Mike Rowe…

Mike,
I’m not sure where I heard that you are an Eagle Scout, which brings me to my question. Could you PLEASE take a moment & post to my 13 year old son Kelby & encourage him to finish scouting (& anything else that’ll help with this?) Reason I’m asking is that he only lacks 1 1/2 – 2 years in reaching Eagle, but some of his buddies have got him to thinking scouting isn’t cool at his age.
Thanks much, Gary

(The article says): Indeed Mike is infact an Eagle Scout, and he had a great response to the request addressed to Kelby, here is the first part:

Your Dad asked me to drop you a line and say something inspirational that might persuade you to dig down deep and find the determination to make the rank of Eagle Scout. It’s a reasonable request, from a father who obviously wants to see his son succeed. But here’s the thing – The Eagle Award is not really meant for people who need to be dragged across the finish line. It’s meant for a select few, and I have no idea if you have the guts to see it through.

There is a mode of thought there. The first inclination is to give the kid encouragement. But really, why note exceptionality if you have to make someone be exceptional? Self drive is the behavior to model, and the right call is to insist that people be exceptional on their own merits, not because they had a cheerleader. Everyone needs encouragement, but a leader, someone who can BE exceptional should be able to see it through when they get that close.

What is your second response? “What is the world coming to?” Yes, that is good, too.

Third, you would be right to say “this is a teaching moment”.

Ok, but what you should really be saying is “Rather than be outraged, we should be shocked. We should be explicitly saying to ourselves repeatedly as a society that we will not tolerate dishonest and predatory stuff like this. We should be all over people from an early age for being animals.”

As a society there should have been ten people willing to pull her aside and call BS on her.

I am not advocating vigilante behavior. I am saying that peer pressure can and should be used for good, and we should be focusing on that rather than shaking our heads and “Hnnuhh, it’s a shame.”

So what is the name of the new school of thought that smells things like they are, that sees through to the real heart of the issue at hand? It has to be wise, respectful, and worthy of being called rational. It has to stand for no-holds-barred judgement, requiring no apology because it is self evident.

It has to respectfully say “you don’t show evidence of having grit” or “you have truly earned recognition” or “you need to get off your butt and contribute” or “thank you for your amazing commitment.”

I have followed this NSA thing this last week and a number of things keep circulating in my head.

One, is anyone really surprised? Was anyone surprised that this capability existed?

Two, the guy did us a favor by showing real proof.

Three, the guy broke an oath, or at the very least a binding sworn contract that he would not blab. That is really totally uncool. I am not fond of whistleblowers.

Four, he wasn’t in an enviable situation. What he was seeing was wrong and there should be a lot of folks embarrassed that they played a part in this mess. This guy is in the grey area of no right solution, no fair solution, but cold hard facts. Life sucks.

Six, I heard some wanker from higher up actually say “We can’t read all those emails.” … as if that makes it ok. It doesn’t matter! If you cannot read them, why do you need them? This leads to the logic of “if you aren’t doing anything wrong you won’t mind us searching your stuff.”

Seven, Obama said:

America is “going to have to make some choices” balancing privacy and security

… I ask… WHY? At the expense of my online privacy, my telephone calls, tracking my movements via cellphones, and at some point my vehicles as well?

Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.

Eight, short of a figurative nuclear smoking gun, Obama is political Teflon(tm).

********

Spaced Diode is nearly home, sailing back from Bermuda. I have sent him the following plaintext message:

spaced diode do not come home stop zombies have us surrounded stop we have been holed up and all are safe until the beans and water run out stop it was not the manatees stop it was the squirrels stop the squirrels were ground zero stop pray for us all stop

One of two things will result from a second term with President Obama.

A top-heavy bureaucracy the electorate cannot touch always expands to the system’s limits of energy. Steal it from the aged, from the retired, from anyone. Especially from those we once called middle class because that’s where most of the energy originates. – Frank Herbert

This is what I fear. A bureaucracy that this electorate cannot touch. We already have it and that bureaucracy is a parasitic one that gives enough of the host just enough resources in return that the host is more than willing to enslave itself for more – it’s an addiction cycle most sinister.

The second thing I fear and it is even worse, is that the parasitic/narcotic cycle mentioned above will contain just enough paralytic that the nourishing elements of the electorate that could fight back are neutralized by an addicted majority.

Let’s lay that out a bit straighter. A bureaucracy that is top heavy and cannot be controlled by the healthiest portion of the population that is becoming a minority with increasingly few resources to resist now has a majority of the population feeding off the healthiest. And that bureaucracy is kept in power by those that it keeps fed. Those that are providing are no longer necessary for the cycle of power to be renewed again and again.

THIS IS CALLED SLAVERY. IT DOES NOT CARRY CHAINS OR WHIPS BUT LAWS, FINES, LOSS OF PROPERTY AND SAVINGS, AND THREATS OF PRISON. IT IS STILL CALLED SLAVERY.

If neither happens then it gets even worse. The debt burden will become crushing. An addict never stops without a bottoming out. We will follow the path of Greece when our practices can no longer be denied. At that point the situation will be quite dire indeed.

Brit Hume hit the nail on the head. The pundits have been trying to make sense of the polls and reportage, because they make little or no sense.

He said we have X percentage of conservatives. We have Y percentage of liberals. That leaves 40% moderates.

His answer is that most of those moderates are liberals. Liberals became a dirty word and so it became better to call themselves moderates.

FACT: Liberals are very good at changing their colors. Not liberals… Moderates. Just like Global Warming morphed into Climate Change and so on.
It’s all in what you call yourself. A win on the conservative side for standing by your ideals, saying what you are, refusing to buy people with free stuff, and calling it like you see it is a Pyrrhic victory – yes, we have won on the side of being true, but we keep getting the shit bashed out of us when it comes to a nation of people who say “What you got fo me?”

Yeah, I am in a piss-ass mood. I don’t see how we can get the electoral votes. It’s early but it isn’t looking good.

My Personal “Things” – Don’t Peek

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